Who will get the political blame for the sky-high joblessness among younger voters?

Twitter has reduced historical memory to minutes, but think back to what had the political class atwitter last week. Back then the air filled with worry on the left that Barack Obama was losing his juice after the gun-control setback, the sequester backfire and the Syrian red-line roll-up.

The left can breathe easy. Conservatives this week, clearly over the funk of losing to him last November, have resumed their favorite political blood sport: Tearing each other apart. The conservative tribes are at it again over that most ancient of all grievances: immigration.

Here's the rub: Just as this self-immolating civil war resumes, the political left is getting out ahead of the conservatives on an issue that matters a lot more to most people: the seemingly intractable problem of young Americans who can't find jobs.

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In Campaign 2012, Barack Obama promised the youth vote a rose garden. What they've got instead, as far as the eye can see, is an employment wasteland. With the right encouragement, this voting bloc could turn against the happy faces that made so many empty promises to them. The progressives are taking note.

The left-wing think tank, the Center for American Progress, published a study last month called "The High Cost of Youth Unemployment." This past Sunday, the New York Times carried a deconstruction of the youth unemployment nightmare, and the Huffington Post built its own piece around the Times's analysis.

After nurturing this voting bloc, the left can see that the millennials and their debt-laden parents will start looking for someone to blame for their off-the-charts joblessness. But while the left tries to defuse this time bomb, as far as one can tell, the GOP's attention to it is virtually nonexistent. Gotta get America's version of the Berlin Wall built along the Rio Grande to keep Mexicans out of our fish-cleaning factories and grass-cutting jobs.

The Center for American Progress study is a straight-ahead description of the grim employment status and diminished earnings prospects of whites, Hispanic and especially younger blacks. The official unemployment rate for people in their late teens and post-college years is around 16%, but add in those who've given up looking or taken jobs flipping hamburgers (underemployment) and their home-alone status moves past 25%. For young blacks—the most politically misled people in America—the out-of-work number is between 40% and 50%.

ENLARGE

David Gothard

The word "Obama" appears nowhere in the Center's study, but it doesn't dodge the fact that these high unemployment numbers have persisted the past four years. Other than noting lost consumer demand, there's no pitch here for more government spending as the solution. In fact the Center says that knock-on problems of a low-jobs generation include the costs of "government-provided health care, increased crime, and additional welfare payments."

While this problem won't go away soon, the Times piece suggests how it will be explained away. The problem is global (true), and the "root causes" include low educational achievement (true, just don't mention the teachers unions) and not enough retraining. To help, we also could ease those parts of "the regulatory thicket without societal benefits" (translation: hands off ObamaCare). Other than that, economists find all this youth unemployment "a very big puzzle." Hmm.

Europe, awash in college diplomas, has had high youth unemployment for decades. It's an established school of study for economists there. And they know the causes: a decline in economic growth made worse by regulatory thickets (with or without societal benefits), and entitlement obligations and tax regimes that drove the entrepreneurial instinct out of Europe. What remained were jobs in government bureaucracies.

The U.S. under Barack Obama is at the edge of the dark jobs forest Europe disappeared into in the 1970s, with our annual growth during his term down around 2% instead of over its normal 3%. Our kids are starting to look and sound like Europe's smart kids—despondent and resigned.

On Sunday, Barack Obama stood before the graduates of Ohio State and exhorted them to pour their energies and new knowledge into . . . politics. His speech referred once to salaried work: The job market, he said, is "steadily healing." An adverb fronting a gerund; talk doesn't get any weaker than that.

For an alert opposition, openings exist. The Young America's Foundation just did a deep polling dive into the attitudes of these voters, and one answer stands out. Asked if the "free market is mostly unfair and requires government intervention to correct," 33% agreed and 45% disagreed. And a November analysis by Civicyouth.org at Tufts University noted that younger black males (age 18-24) have never been as excited about Barack Obama as women are. Not having a job could chill enthusiasm for any president.

None of these voting blocs will default to the GOP in two years or four years. Denunciations of "government" won't win them over. How the jobs catastrophe has happened to this generation requires extended Economy 101 tutorials from smart conservative candidates, if they know how.

But enough about jobless 24-year-old Americans. Let's get back to the Battle of the Rio Grande.

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